


Every Day Is Mother's Day

by Anonymous



Series: RNM Week 2019 [2]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Malex, Post season finale, rnm week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 03:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19939240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Michael can always find his mother at the bottom of the bottle.





	Every Day Is Mother's Day

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by a conversation with Amanda. 
> 
> written for Roswell Week 2019.

Michael can always find his mother at the bottom of the bottle.

He’ll pour a cup of libation (then another, then another) and know exactly where he’s going.

To the bottom of the bottle.

Where the world makes sense, where every problem has a solution, and life doesn’t hurt so goddamn much. He swims backstrokes through shots of whiskey, chased by laughter, everybody around him his best friend. Painting slurred words on impressionable faces, feeling like Picasso.

The world gets slippery. Suddenly it’s hard to walk in a straight line, and because he can’t keep his balance, he decides to stay in one place and let the bottle take him where’er it may go, knowing it will never let him go.

He keeps going till there’s nothing left, no memory of today, just this pounding headache searching for absent recollections and those frantic question marks crowded into worried text messages. Strange bruises decorating his body, his throat sore and on fire. And for some reason there’s blood, everywhere, streaming from his nose and the cuts on his knuckles.

At the bottom of the bottle he does the only thing that makes sense at the bottom of the bottle, which is to get a new bottle, and drink till it’s fun again. Black out. Do it all over again (and again, and again) till he can’t even remember why he started drinking or what he was thinking about when he did.

And that’s when he finds her. At the bottom of the bottle.

His mother.

Mom. Momma. Mom. 

It’s a pain so acute he feels like he’s being impaled.

The way she looked at him through the glass, it stripped him to a blank page in his soul. All his life, as far back as he could remember, he had longed for something better than what he was living. Picture: he’s out at the ranch, it’s a cloudless afternoon, he’s lying on his back in the grass looking up at the sky. And it’s a beautiful sky. He’s aware that he’s having a nice moment. That it’s one of those rare and fleeting nice moments in his life. But how long should he let it go on? he wonders. Should he just look at the sky forever? Or at the very least until he gets thirsty or has to go do something else? But he’s always itching to go do something else. The itching finally stopped when he saw her through the glass. He had come home.

Answers he beseeched her for: Who am I / what was my name / what was yours / where do we come from / and how do I get back there / who is my dad / do I have a dad / or is it something different for us / parthenogenesis / gemmules / cell regeneration / never mind / how do I get you out of here / how do I save you—?

Answer he got: _I love you._

Her face, there, at the bottom of the bottle. He can’t remember why he didn’t die with her.

There’s a jukebox blaring and everyone is singing along: _Mama didn’t mean to make you cry, if I’m not back again this time tomorrow carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters._

But he’ll be back, he’s always back again this time tomorrow.

“Rock me, Momma…”

His mom rocks him, not like she’s rocking him to sleep but shaking him awake instead. “My head hurts,” he complains. “Mom, don’t.”

“ _Mom_? Well that’s a new one,” says a voice he recognizes. “Time to get up.”

“Don’ wanna. Let me sleep…” The bottle is tugged out of his hand. “Mo-om…”

He’s strapped into the passenger seat of a car and then the car’s moving and the radio’s playing a song that feels like an old friend. It’s a pretty good song. Cheesy. But still the kind of song that can make you cry. We’re all going to die. And you’re not young anymore. And your childhood is over. And you’re full of regret. And your mom is dead. And there’s no one there to hold you. And you’re not dying yet so you have to keep fighting. And it’s going to hurt. Etc., etc.

Etc., etc. He starts crying.  
  


*  
  


“You kept calling me ‘Mom’ last night,” Alex says.

Michael is so hungover he’s woken up on the second level of the seventh circle of hell with harpies tearing the flesh from his bones and there’s screaming and bleeding, too. His dream—more like a nightmare—had taken him back to those first months at the children’s home, watching cartoons on the Disney channel. Not understanding a thing, not grasping language itself, just watching those 2D cutouts moving across the screen with a kind of muted horror. That fucked up little rodent, Mickey. Peter Pan. And Simba. S _imba, you Hamlet-esque motherfucker. Keep working through that trauma, bro._

Alex has the bucket ready.

Michael pukes in fizzy cartoon technicolor.  


*  
  


Take two.

Michael crawled out of bed and into the shower and back to bed. He felt very fragile, very Humpty-Dumpty. He cocooned himself in the duvet and Alex brought him a tall glass of water and he sipped it as Alex perched at the foot of the bed.

“Well, _that_ hasn’t happened in a while,” Alex remarked. “Not since you moved in.”

“Don’t take it personally,” he rasped; his throat felt sandblasted. He noticed his hands clutching the glass. His knuckles were swollen, starting to scab over in places. “The hell?”

“You got in a fight,” Alex informed him. “Several, actually.”

“Did I win?”

“Well, you were the last one standing.”

“Ooh-rah. Or should I say hoo-ah?”

Alex wouldn’t look at him. His stomach plunged; maybe he was gonna barf again. But no. It was dread. Did he kiss somebody? He must’ve kissed somebody, or something equally terrible, or Alex wouldn’t be not looking at him like this. “What else happened?”

“You led the whole crowd in a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ singalong. You’re lucky I got there when I did, ’cause Maria was about to call the cops.” 

“Aw, my singing ain’t that bad. Just can’t hit those high ‘Galileos.’” He rested the glass against his pounding forehead. “Anything else?”

“And then you cried the whole drive home,” Alex said.

“Oh.” He let his breath out in a great whoosh. “Not bad, considering.”

“Considering what?” Alex said. “The amount you had to drink?”

“I don’t remember how much I had to drink.”

“Guerin, you were blackout.”

“Guess it was my time of the month?” he ventured.

“ _Michael_!”

“Not so loud.” His shoulders hunched up to protect his ears.

Abruptly, Alex stood and exited the bedroom.

“ _Shit._ ” Michael groaned and levered himself upright. He staggered into the first pair of jeans he could find and jammed his sunglasses onto his face, only to double over with a muffled howl of pain. A black eye, right. He had a vague memory of taking a blow to the face, and blood pouring from his nose, but it could be a memory from another night, another fight, who the fuck knew. 

He shuffled out to the porch. Even with sunglasses, the brightness encroached mercilessly on his hangover. Alex sat in the rocking chair, its creaky rhythm at odds with his stiff military posture and clenched jaw. Michael collapsed into the other chair. They sat quietly, Michael enjoying the gentle breeze ruffling through his hair.

Then Alex turned to him, and his eyes were great welling pools of hurt. “Tell me what you need,” he said beseechingly, and Michael recoiled. “Do you need to go to rehab? AA? Do you need a sponsor? _Anything_ —we’ll figure it out, I promise, but you have to _tell_ me because I can’t sit back and watch you keep doing this to yourself.”

“Alex—” Michael began cautiously, but Alex shook his head.

“Last night—you _scared_ me. Getting that call, running reds all the way to the Pony, finding you covered in blood… and you having no idea who I was, calling me _mom_ when I tried to bring you home. And in the car, you just sat there and _sobbed_ , the whole way back.”

Michael cracked his battered knuckles painfully. Alex seemed to be waiting, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. How could he explain himself, when his native tongue seemed to be the parlance of the problem itself? Flawed as ever, in the drunkest tense.

“I wondered if—I had kind of prepared for, you know, when Mother’s Day rolled around.” Alex fumbled the words awkwardly. “But that was a week ago, and nothing…”

“Every day is Mother’s Day for me, Manes,” Michael said. He felt a different kind of weariness settle over his shoulders. “She’s all I think about.”

“But you never _talk_ abo—”

“What’s there to say?” he snapped. “I had, what? Seconds? She said she loved me and then I left her to die.” Viciously, he rounded on Alex: “You blew shit up in Iraq, you saw loads of people die. I want a professional opinion, airman: what do you think it felt like, dying in a big explosion like that?” They had an unspoken rule against discussing what Alex had seen and done during his deployments; only in the darkest hours of the night, when Alex battled his nightmares, was the subject broached, and then only in whispers, in promises and reassurances, and in the tears Michael kissed away.

Alex flinched at this betrayal of nocturnal confidentiality. “It wouldn’t have felt like anything,” he answered quietly. “Just… yeah, like nothing.”

“Nothing,” Michael echoed. “So it didn’t hurt?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I mean, I’d rather blow up too. Than be used for some Nazi science experiment.”

Alex winced.

“I dream about it,” Michael said. “Her getting tortured, by your dad and the others. Seven decades is a whole lifetime. Remember Subject N-38? They made him into a biological weapon by mistake. My mom, all those aliens, tortured and experimented on till they turned into evolutionary freaks… They were feral, you know? It’s fucking insane to have your worst childhood fears come true, to literally meet them face to face, and when that face belongs to your own mother, well… She was everything I’d ever wanted, and everything I’m most afraid of, all within one being. So do you get it, Alex?” he demanded. The fury was ratcheting up inside of him; he didn’t bother to control it, just directed it towards the pile of logs stacked against the cabin wall. They shot twenty feet into the air, hovered for a second, and then crashed back to earth, rolling in every direction. “ _Do you get it now_?”

“Get what, Michael?” Alex wasn’t afraid of him, but he was definitely using that _there-there_ voice reserved for spooked animals and small children. With effort, Michael contained his temper.

“Why I drink,” he said through gritted teeth. “So _no_ , Alex, I don’t need to go to _rehab_ , I don’t need to go to _AA,_ I don’t need a goddamn _sponsor_ , I need… my mom.” Those words, every time he said them— _my mom—_ the tears sprang to his eyes, like they had been lying in wait. Waiting for the anguish he felt every time he said the words _my mom._

Alex looked at him sorrowfully. He always cried when Michael did; Michael could see the tears beading his eyelashes, quivering and waiting to fall. “I can’t give her back to you.” Alex’s voice wobbled. He blinked, and the tears fell. “I wish I could.”

Michael swallowed past the lump in his throat. He could feel the rage flowing out of him, it felt like poison draining away. He patted his lap. “C’mere,” he said, his own voice rough and unsteady. 

Alex’s watery expression turned skeptical.

Michael patted his lap again.

Alex heaved a hiccupy and pointedly dramatic sigh before taking Michael’s proffered hand. Michael tugged him out of the rocker and guided him sideways across his thighs. There was much shifting and wriggling from Alex before they reached a tolerable arrangement. Michael leaned against Alex’s shoulder and wrapped his arms around his waist.

“The way I feel about my mom now, it’s a lot like the way I used to feel about you,” Michael murmured into Alex’s shirt, where his leaking eyes were creating a damp spot.

“You’re… really gonna have to explain that one,” Alex said, and Michael chuckled.

“D’you remember that night a few months ago when I called you, and I was so fucked up, I’d forgotten we were broken up?”

Alex, resting his chin atop his head, nodded.

“I’d forgotten I was dating Maria… And even though you kept telling me ‘Guerin, Guerin, I’m not your boyfriend, Guerin,’ it just wouldn’t compute inside my drunk brain. So I got mad and yelled ‘I still love you, you stupid fuck!’ and hung up. Remember?”

“Vividly.” 

“Well, at least we were talking again…” Michael tried for smug but knew he just sounded pathetic. “I was living in this impossible reality where you and I _weren’t_ together, but whenever I got wasted, the universe would simplify and… realign,” he explained. “You know? In my simplest, drunkest cosmos, we were _us_. Because that was the only reality that made sense.” He tugged Alex a little closer. “It’s similar with my mom. I get fucked up, and it’s easier to block out the bad. I’m left with the vision she gave me, where I’m a kid and she’s still young and beautiful and—intact. Like, I know she’s my momma, and something bad happens, but I’m hiding forever inside that moment when she says she loves me. And that, Alex, is why I drink. The end.” He sighed and buried his face in Alex’s shirt again. “I’m way too hungover for this emo shit, man.”

Alex’s dexterous fingers moved through his damp curls, twisting them into corkscrews. Michael felt himself growing drowsy. But his sunglasses were starting to press painfully into his face as he burrowed deeper into Alex’s shoulder so, reluctantly, he disengaged and sat up. He took off his sunglasses and squinted at Alex, who had been silent for a long time.

Alex looked utterly stricken.

“What?”

“I… I had no idea.” Alex blinked at him glassily, apparently unaware of the tears streaking his cheeks or the snot dripping from his nose. Michael reached up to blot Alex’s face with his shirtsleeve before he remembered he wasn’t wearing a shirt; he went ahead and wiped Alex’s nose with his hand. He wasn’t fastidious.

“Well, I wouldn’t want you thinking I’m an alcoholic for anything less than profound personal trauma, Alex.”

But his attempt at levity fell flat. Alex seemed almost nauseated; he had gone green about the gills and his fists were clenching and unclenching where they rested on his thighs.

“You gonna puke, Manes? Because if you are, I can almost guarantee a chain reaction,” Michael warned. He got a firm grip on Alex and gathered him close. “No offense, dude, but—”

“Don’t call me that.” Alex swallowed audibly. “Not right now.”

“—babe, darlin’, love of my life, but I’m not sure I understand what’s going on right now.” He felt a stabbing pain in his left temple and put his sunglasses back on.

“What you just said about your mom, about me—Michael, I feel so helpless.” Alex actually wrung his hands. “How can I—I mean, I kind of hate myself, that I occupy this place in your life, when I’m _responsible_ for so much of—”

“Which part of _love of my life_ did you fail to comprehend?”

“Michael—”

“No, Alex, _you_ listen.” He felt an onrush of dizziness; he closed his eyes until it passed. “You asked why I got fucked up last night, and I told you. If you want me to _talk—_ instead of wallowing in my _dramatic cowboy angst_ , as DeLuca would call it—then you can’t guilt-trip yourself over everything I say. Especially if it’s a your-family/my-family thing. My mom—” His throat tightened and his eyes filled. “This is ridiculous. Why can’t I just say it— _my mom_? I’m so fucking sick of crying.” He swiped angrily at his cheeks.

“Moms are special,” Alex told him, sounding a little calmer than he had before. “Even when they’re not around, they’re—yeah, they’re special. I mean, obviously I’m prejudiced, but—more special than dads, sometimes?”

“Yeah.” Michael nodded. “It could only have been her, you know? Or I wouldn’t have—I mean, I couldn’t have believed anyone else in that moment at the prison, when she said she loved me. I feel weird about dads. And _yes_ ,” he continued, before Alex could interrupt, “a lot of that’s based on how your dad treated you growing up. Because, like, Señor Ortecho is obviously a good padre and a good hombre.”

“Are you saying my dad was a _bad hombre_ , Guerin?” Alex said, starting to giggle, which made Michael laugh, too.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

It wasn’t that funny but neither of them could stop, their laughter taking on a hysterical edge. “Can’t breathe,” Alex gasped, clutching his ribs, and when he inhaled it sounded like hyperventilating.

“Hey, whoa…”

They rocked each other back and forth, the chair groaning under their combined weight.

“Two grown men,” Alex said, a little despairingly, once they were calmer.

Michael nuzzled into his neck and breathed him in.

“Can I tell you something?” Alex asked.

“ _Duh_ , I’m your”—Michael flapped his hand—“whatever.” 

“The way you smiled at your mom,” Alex said, “it was like I’d never seen you smile before. Even though the circumstances were—horrific—I think I fell in love with you all over again, when I saw you smile.”

“I have _her_ smile,” Michael managed to say after a minute. “It was like looking in a mirror.” 

“I wanna—I hope you can smile like that again, one day,” Alex said, taking his hand and lacing their fingers together.

“I can practice,” he offered.

“Please don’t.” Alex squeezed his hand. “No more pretending.” 

“Yeah.” Michael squeezed back. “I wish I could find that mirror somewhere else, somewhere that isn’t at the bottom of a bottle.”

“Don’t bite my head off,” Alex started.

“Uh oh—”

“… but d’you think it might be worth giving AA shot?”

“I’ve thought about it,” Michael said honestly. “But… the effort of telling a whole pack of lies, just so I can blab about _one_ truth to a room full of strangers…”

Alex nodded.

“I’d rather just, like, keep trying to build our life, as best we can, the two of us. But if I can’t—if stuff like last night keeps happening, you can ask me that question again. Fair?”

“Fair,” Alex agreed.

“Thank you.” Michael leaned in, sliding his hand into Alex’s hair. He tugged lightly, and let gravity do the rest of the work to bring Alex’s mouth to his.

“I’m sorry for scaring you last night,” he mumbled when they drew apart.

“I know.” Alex closed the distance between them again.

Michael lost himself in the soft exchange of kisses, his lips finding Alex’s over and over and over. He felt quiet, dreamy. His tongue teased its way into Alex’s mouth, and they began to make out in earnest. Alex twisted around, leaning back to get his left leg up and over, and then he was straddling him. Michael grunted his approval. Alex dragged his hands over his bare shoulders and down his chest; Michael felt his abdominals quiver, his breathing accelerate, as Alex’s hands drifted lower, dipping under his jeans, which he hadn’t even bothered to fasten up properly.

His stomach heaved.

He wrenched away, leaning back and closing his eyes as he forced himself to breathe slowly.

“What’s wrong?” Alex demanded, somewhere between concerned and disgruntled.

“I’m trying not to throw up,” Michael said, without opening his mouth. He took a few more shallow breaths and the wave of nausea passed. “Jesus I am so hungover,” he groaned.

“Off your game, Guerin.”

“Don’t I fucking know it.”

“C’mon then.” Alex began to dismount; if he felt Michael’s powers gently helping him to his feet, he didn’t remark on it. “Coffee and aspirin first, then maybe sex later.”

“ _Maybe_?” Michael protested feebly. He took Alex’s arm for support as they hobbled inside, Michael by far the unsteadier of the two. “ _Definitely_. I’m going to dazzle you with my recovery, Manes. I’ll be DTF in no time at all.”

“Yeah, no doubt,” Alex said dryly, and guided him over the threshold. 

**Author's Note:**

> music cred Freddie, of course. 
> 
> previously: THE LIGHT-YEARS, SATELLITE'S GONE, etc. 
> 
> thank you so much for reading. 
> 
> <3


End file.
